Selling digital downloads on your website can be easier than you think. WordPress is the best option for that, and this guide will show how to effectively sell your digital products online on this platform.
Remember, selling digital downloads has a different process than physical – it’s simpler, quicker, and most importantly – cheaper.
So, if you ever considered selling digital downloads on the web, this article is just for you.
Use Easy Digital Downloads
There is a WordPress plugin Easy Digital Downloads that can help you sell any digital product you like on your website.
This plugin will let you build an online store for digital products with no technical knowledge from your part.
It is different from plugins that create stores for physical products, and the process is more straightforward. With this plugin, you can sell products like software, PLR ebooks & articles, video training, online courses, tutorials, and any other media files.
Keep in mind that even if you don’t want to use this plugin, you need to find an alternative tool as WordPress by itself has no internal features that allow you to primarily store and sell digital downloads.
The steps in the process will be very simple – you must create your website first, and then add the digital products to your store.
Create a WordPress Website For Digital Products:
The first step for building every new website is to buy a domain name and a hosting provider. You can start by visiting Bluehost and clicking the get started button. On the next page, you can see four packages and choose the one you prefer.
Next, you will have to choose your domain name. The great thing about Bluehost is that it offers a free domain name!
Tips for choosing your domain:
You don’t always need to try too hard when choosing your website name, and it’s usually not that important.
You can type a word relevant to the product and check for their suggestions. If you don’t like them, you can keep looking until you find something nice and brandable.
Taking domain with a .com extension is often a better idea than going for other domain endings. One of the reasons is that Users who want to visit a website directly type the name of the site and add .com by habit.
Lastly, you want something that people can remember, and it is easy to write. You don’t want to lose traffic because your domain name is too complicated.
Then, Bluehost will request your personal and payment details before going to the page with the packages.
If you want to get the domain name for free, you must buy a package for at least for 12 months.
It’s a good choice because you decrease the monthly cost when you increase the duration of your packages.
After these first steps, you will receive your login details to your email.
Before getting started with the Easy Digital Downloads plugin, you must login to your account, choose any theme and install it into your WordPress site. And you good to go!
If you have any issues completing these steps, you have done something wrong, but it is ok. You can always go back and recheck all the steps.
To check the full step-by-step guide on how you can create a WordPress website, you can visit this page.
Install and Set up Easy Digital Downloads
Once you create your first website, you can now install our plugin. When you are on your dashboard click plugins section from the menu on the left-hand side, then select add new, and type Easy Digital Downloads. You will easily find the plugin, click install and activate.
In the sidebar of your dashboard, you want to click downloads and general settings. The plugin will create pages that can help you to sell your products like the checkout page and success page.
You can easily customize these pages anytime if you don’t like them. Next, you can change settings like your location and currency.
You want to put the right data depending on your targeted countries and your audience. There are two payment gateways with this plugin – PayPal and Amazon.
You can enable the one you prefer or select both of them and click save before moving to the next options.
In the emails tab, you can choose an email campaign, your logo, and set up emails for sale receipts and notifications.
If you need additional features, you can buy the extensions of the website that include more payment gateways, and options to add an autoresponder, or other tools that are helpful with the process.
Add Digital Downloads To Your Website
The last step of the setup process is to add your digital downloads to your store. To do that, you have to go to downloads and click add new.
You will need to write a title, a nice description, set up the price, and upload all necessary images.
Lastly, you can select a product’s featured image, category, and click publish.
Remember a good front-end marketing including rich description and relevant image can maximize your selling results, so take time to nail these things in the first place.
If you are not sure how to describe your products, find a few similar products in the online marketplace and get the ideas.
Promote Your Products
You created your first store, that is an excellent achievement. Most people do not take any action at all. However, nothing will happen if you sit back and just wait.
Now, you must go out to the world and promote your digital products.
When it comes to online stores, many marketers use paid advertising. If you have a budget to spend, you can try some Facebook Ads or Google Ads.
For Facebook Ads, you need an image of your product and a small description. For example, if your product is an ebook, you can add its cover to the image.
Next, you can find a few target audiences from the options of Facebook and run your ad for a few days. Once you get the first results, you can decide on your next steps.
Another way to get better results with Facebook ads is by optimizing your store for conversions. You can run a few tests on the design of your store, change the prices, the buttons, or you can try to add an email form and send promotional emails to your subscribers.
If you get started with Google Ads, you will target keywords instead of audiences, and you don’t need an image. You will set up a budget and wait for a few days for the results.
When you get enough data, you can keep the profitable keywords running and stop the ones that do not work.
Without a budget, you can start blogging for free on your website, make a few videos on YouTube, or post content on social media. If you create any type of content regularly, you will start getting targeted regular visitors, that will potentially make sales.
Final Words
The bottom line is that you don’t necessarily have to sell digital downloads in online marketplaces and lose a big part of your sales in commissions. You can simply do this on your own online store powered by WordPress.
The technical part of this process can be covered with a simple plugin that helps users to create beautiful stores.
However, if you are serious about building a business for your digital products, you need to actively work on marketing channels. It may take some effort and time when it comes to free traffic or a budget when you start with paid advertising.
Once you make your first sales, you can scale your efforts in many ways, and this is where you can multiply your earnings.
You can create more products, optimize your sales pages, outsource some tasks and increase the marketing efforts.